There were sizable Spanish-speaking communities in New York City in the 1960s, but not much of a performing arts community that served their needs. That changed when Miriam Colón founded the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater (PRTT) in 1967. Colón, a Puerto Rican actor who had made a name for herself in Hollywood and on the New York stage, sought to create a cultural hub where artists and audiences of Hispanic heritage could find community and share their stories. Colón and PRTT soon became the center of a vibrant theater ecosystem. Writers, poets, and playwrights flocked to PRTT, hoping to see their work performed. Colón was flooded with hundreds of scripts and ushered dozens into production.
Decades later, Colón began exploring ways to keep that creative activity going without her. She looked towards Pregones Theater, one of the organizations borne of an artistic movement she had inspired. A younger ensemble whose dedication to its artform and its community mirrored Colón’s, Pregones was well placed to carry her torch. It also offered something PRTT did not have. Founded by a trio of performers who shared creative and administrative responsibilities, it had an ensemble-based culture that could thrive without a single force at its center. The two organizations merged in 2014 and became Pregones/Puerto Rican Traveling Theater.
That organization is now preparing for another transition as the forces behind the Pregones Theater, who still run Pregones/PRTT, prepare to step down. Among their top priorities: to help future leaders understand the artistic practices that have made Pregones/PRTT an award-winning theater of international renown. “We were missing a way to capture what I see as the tremendous intellectual capital of the artistic team of this organization,” says Arnaldo J. López, the company’s managing director. “Why this work? Why these themes? Why these topics? Why this particular way of doing theater? It’s implicit in the practice, but it's not fully explicit anywhere else.”
Enter Raquel Jimenez, one of 18 research fellows funded by Wallace’s Advancing Well-Being in the Arts initiative, a broad-ranging effort that is supporting scores of arts organizations rooted in communities of color. The initiative has funded the Social Science Research Council, an independent nonprofit that oversees research internationally, to place an early-career research fellow with each of 18 relatively large organizations, including Jimenez at Pregones/PRTT. The fellows’ charge is to analyze and document the organizations’ histories, their practices, and other aspects the organizations may wish to explore. “They are capturing the histories of important, impactful organizations that aren't represented in the research literature,” says Bronwyn Bevan, Wallace’s vice president of research. “Their studies are also meant to be resources for the arts organizations themselves.”
For Jimenez, the task was to understand the organization’s past work and uncover building blocks that could guide it in the future. “We are looking to have this information front and center as we bring in new people to join the ensemble,” López says. “We want to invite those folks to carry what they deem the best of this work forward.”
New Narratives for a New Road Ahead
Jimenez spent a year with Pregones/PRTT. She interviewed the company’s artistic leaders to learn about the goals of their productions, the methods they use to achieve those goals, and how they determine whether productions meet the goals. She joined staff meetings, table reads, rehearsals, and post-performance reviews. She pored over documents such as strategic plans, grant proposals, marketing materials, and reviews.
The company’s work, she writes in her yet-to-be-published case study, finds its roots in the activism of the 1970s and '80s. Much of it investigates ideas of home and belonging, and how Puerto Rico’s history of colonization and disenfranchisement complicates those concepts. It seeks to create counternarratives that challenge dominant views, create a sense of community, and perhaps inspire collective action.
How does Pregones/PRTT work to create those counternarratives? Jimenez combines her observations of the company with research from several disciplines, including art theory, psychology, history, and cultural anthropology, to identify the barriers the artistic team faced and the ways in which it worked to overcome them.
Jimenez notes, for example, that many of the company’s productions tend to emphasize relatable and trustworthy characters. She refers to a 2023 musical that explores ethnic identity through the eyes of a Puerto Rican father grappling with a sense of loss because his mixed-race son was likely to identify as white. Jimenez points to anthropological research arguing that such character-centered productions can help make abstract concepts such as cultural identity more concrete. She cites sociological research that says concrete depictions of personal struggles help audiences retain what they see. When audiences relate to and retain what they see, she writes, preexisting perceptions begin to change.
We are looking to have this information front and center as we bring in new people to join the ensemble. We want to invite those folks to carry what they deem the best of this work forward.
— Arnaldo J. López, Managing Director, Pregones/Puerto Rican Theater Company
Jimenez’s report includes several such insights into how and why the company’s productions work. Her hope, she says, is not just to document the organization’s artistic approach for future leaders, but also to contribute to a change in the standards those leaders are often expected to meet.
“Arts organizations are situated in the broader institution of capital-A ‘Art,’ which tends to define what can be construed as quality,” she says. “If an organization like Pregones/PRTT can define its own standards for excellence, I think it signals to the broader field that there are many different ways to be excellent.”
Reinforcing A Fortress
While Pregones/PRTT investigates what worked in the past, another organization across town is exploring what might work in the future. The Laundromat Project was founded two decades ago to support artists working with and for communities of color far from mainstream cultural hubs such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It operated for many years without a permanent location, supporting projects across the city in public spaces such as plazas, parks, and laundromats (hence the name).
By 2020, The LP, as it is colloquially known, had enough resources to establish a physical home. It signed a long-term lease on a storefront where it was founded, the historically Black Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn.
That neighborhood has changed significantly, however. It is one of the fastest gentrifying neighborhoods in the country, with median rents skyrocketing by 88 percent between 2006 and 2022. Many longtime residents have been pushed out; the neighborhood’s Black population has shrunk from 75 percent in 2000 to 41 percent now. An organization founded to bring cultural assets to underserved communities now finds itself in a different situation: working to preserve cultural assets where rapid development threatens to wipe them out.
“When things are changing so rapidly, what does it mean to stay anchored, to stay connected, to feel a sense of belonging?” asks Ayesha Williams, executive director of The LP. “How can our programming help to inform that?”
Amanda Boston, a Brooklyn native and scholar of African American history and culture, partnered with The LP to find out. Her charge was to determine what support Bedford-Stuyvesant residents may need from a cultural organization and how The LP could provide it. “It is to help understand what it means to be in alignment with both the needs and the aspirations of the community,” Williams says. “That's our function, that's our purpose, and that's what the work with Amanda is helping to inform.”
Boston conducted an extensive review of the past and present of Bedford-Stuyvesant and what residents may wish for its future. She scoured media and literature and compiled a history of the neighborhood. She interviewed leaders of community boards, local businesses, block associations, and arts and cultural institutions. She visited block parties, a fixture of Black communities in Brooklyn, and conducted focus groups of area residents. She asked people what they most valued about Bed-Stuy, what they wanted to preserve, and how they wanted their neighborhood to grow.
“It was a time to think in practical ways about what the community needed and to learn that information in the words of the people in the community,” Boston says. “What is the role of the arts in building community power? How can The LP use the arts to build community power? Those are some of the questions we were teasing out.”
Based on her analysis so far, Boston believes one of Bedford-Stuyvesant’s greatest strengths may be its history. The LP may be uniquely placed to help the neighborhood use that history as a springboard for future progress.
Boston points, for example, to the mélange of Black identities in Brooklyn, from recent African immigrants to well-established Caribbean communities to residents whose ancestors moved from the American South during the Great Migration. “You've got all these traditions of Black pride, Black nationalism, and Black culture melding together,” she says. “Black-owned businesses and organizations take pride in those roots.”
That pride, Boston says, has given way to a sense of loss. The neighborhood that produced the country’s first community development corporation in 1967 and elected the first Black woman to Congress in 1968 is starting to look more like the younger, whiter, richer neighborhoods closer to Wall Street. “It’s been a city within a city, which is part of why this rapid racial and class transformation has been so jarring,” Boston adds. “Because it has been a fortress for so long.”
What is the role of the arts in building community power? How can The LP use the arts to build community power? Those are some of the questions we were teasing out.
— Amanda Boston, research fellow placed with The Laundromat Project
The LP could help the community harness its pride and assert its identity, Boston argues. When she asked people about elements of their neighborhood that made them most proud, Boston says, they often cited the art. “They pointed to the historic connection between art and social movements,” she says. “People have talked about art as a place to have hard conversations. A place for reflection, for learning, for confrontation.”
The LP could consider how its new storefront might provide a home for such art, Boston argues, and for a community that feels it is losing one. “Space is increasingly a premium for everyone,” she says. “What does it mean for The LP to provide a physical space for people to gather, reflect, and lean on one another in ways that seem so rare?”
Williams and her team will need time to consider such questions. But Boston’s work, Williams suggests, is already ensuring that they approach those questions with the care and the understanding they deserve. “We organizationally can, in isolation, set our own path, establish our own language, our own way of talking about things,” she says. “But if it's not in alignment with the community, then what is our purpose?”
Questions to Ponder, Reasons for Hope
Pregones/PRTT and The LP represent just a few of the concerns facing the organizations participating in Wallace’s Advancing Well-Being in the Arts initiative. Others are pondering equally intricate, often difficult questions. What does it mean to represent a community or its culture? Can like-minded organizations work together in different ways to achieve similar goals? How can an arts organization support communities through the pressures of gentrification without becoming a cause of that gentrification?
The Wallace website will feature research briefs of the fellows’ work as they become available. We hope these might benefit other organizations grappling with similar questions. The first few of those briefs can be found here.
The work so far does seem to provide value to those participating in the research. López of Pregones/PRTT describes what he saw as the organization’s artistic leaders worked with Jimenez. "I could see the gears in their heads turning with excitement," he says, "both in the humble recognition that they've done good work, and in the excitement that there's still more work forward. That's pretty priceless."
